By 2017-2018, the definition of what a front-end developer should do had expanded and grown, bringing engineers back to technologies that most of the times they didn’t want to use: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Like I shared in another lesson, we were moving away from the time when Web Designers were supposed to take care of both design and implementation because engineers felt those were related and didn’t want to bother with that. In a way I believe they were.

By the time we decided it made sense to allow for this split, we were aiming at training both designers who knew how to code and developers who understood design. I still believe that’s how people’s knowledge should be shaped but the problem was believing I could train both at the same time.

Even after moving on from Web Design, not focusing on design alone was not a good decision. We did want to have an open curriculum but this decision cause the cohort to split and decide where they wanted to focus more. It caused so much pressure while scheduling events and classes for both groups of students that I feel we failed the expectations of both at times.

In short, the management and expectations complexity this single decision caused was not worth it for TNDS. We still did our best to deliver what we had promised and to this day, some alumni are in fact working as developers. But who knows how much easier it could have been for them if they had gone through an actual development-focused program instead.